Stop Annoying "doubleclick.net" Requests Loading Your Site Down

Have you ever felt your website was a bit sluggish, but couldn‘t pinpoint why? Website owners like you often notice death by a thousand cuts, where needless little requests to external domains gradually add up to a slower site over time.

One common culprit? Requests made out to doubleclick.net that only serve irrelevant ads and remarketing. Just from disabling these pointless calls, I‘ve seen site load times drop by over 30% on some sites.

In this guide, we‘ll cover exactly what doubleclick.net is, why it can needlessly slow your site down, and how to easily block requests to it using different methods. I‘ll also explain how you can test things are working and further speed up your website.

By the end, you‘ll be able to rid your beautiful site of these annoying requests and have it loading faster for your visitors.

What is Doubleclick.net and Why Should You Care?

Doubleclick.net is a domain owned by Google that‘s used specifically for their remarketing and advertising tracking efforts. Any requests to doubleclick.net are helping serve targeted Google ads or collect analytics data.

Now if you use features like Google Adsense or actually want their remarketing pixels for serving tailored ads, then the requests make sense for your site. But I‘ve found many sites keep doubleclick.net enabled purely out of default without realizing the performance implications.

But what does blocking these requests actually do? Here are two compelling reasons:

Less Requests Speed Up Your Overall Site

Every additional HTTP request adds more load time – think connecting to and transferring data from an external server for resources that aren‘t even integral to your site for visitors. Doubleclick.net requests render useless ads and trackers at the cost of speed – I‘d call that lost time and energy!

Recent studies have shown:

• A 400 millisecond delay in site load speed can impact conversions by over 7% – that adds up to serious lost revenue over time!
• A 1 second slowdown leads to 11% less page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Your site‘s speed clearly impacts visitor experience and retention.

So reducing pointless calls like doubleclick.net directly speeds up your site‘s load time. Even a 100ms saving is meaningful at scale. Death by a thousand cuts reversed!

Enhanced Site Privacy and Security

Allowing unnecessary third party requests also opens up potential privacy concerns. Analytics and advertising trackers try piecing together visitor identities and behavior out of self-interest.

But does your visitor really care about remarketing ads? Likely not. By limiting calls to sites like doubleclick.net, you restrict needless tracking and create a more visitor-focused site.

How Much Faster Will My Site Get?

Good question! The impact blocking doubleclick.net has depends on your existing site speed and server location relative to Google‘s servers.

From my own tests, I‘ve seen site load times drop by over 30% just from disabling doubleclick.net requests by tweaking Google Analytics as explained below.

In one example, load time improved by over 0.5 seconds on a simple 5 page WordPress site hosted on a shared server in Europe. For more complex sites, gains can be even bigger!

Hopefully that establishes why useless doubleclick.net requests only serve to slow your site down. Now let‘s explore ways to actually block them at the source!

How to Quickly Block Doubleclick.net Requests

There are a few different techniques site owners use to stop calls being made out to doubleclick.net from their website.

Here are the most popular options along with their pros and cons:

1. Via Google Analytics Settings

The official way to disable doubleclick.net requests is directly inside Google Analytics. Since doubleclick powers their remarketing and ad tracking functionality, you can toggle them off there.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account

2. Navigate to Admin >> Tracking Info >> Data Collection

3. Under advertising reporting, toggle the disable switches on for:

   • Remarketing
   • Advertising Reporting Features

4. Scroll down and click Save to apply your changes.

This immediately informs Google Analytics to stop collecting remarketing and advertising data or calling out to doubleclick.net. Typically you‘ll see the changes reflected on your live site within the hour as various caches clear.

Pros

• Official Google recommended way to disable doubleclick requests sitewide.
• Easy process with instant results.

Cons

• Need access to your Google Analytics account – requires ownership of or edit access to your site‘s GA property.

So if you have access to your site‘s GA dashboard, this is by far the easiest and most robust way to block doubleclick.net.

Let‘s look at a couple other common options for more technical site owners:

2. Block via Browser Extension

Popular ad blocking browser extensions like uBlock Origin maintain huge blocklists of advertising and tracking domains, including doubleclick.net.

So just having uBlock Origin enabled on sites would prevent calls out to doubleclick while you browse.

However, this only impacts your own browsing sessions where you have uBlock active. It doesn‘t actually stop requests on your live site for normal visitors.

Handy for development and initial testing, but not a complete doubleclick blocking solution in itself.

Pros

• Easy install for browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
• Instant blocking while browsing your own site.

Cons

• Client-side only so doesn‘t impact actual site visitors without extension installed.

3. Creating Server Firewall Rules

If you have server root access, you can alternatively set up firewall rules to block outbound traffic to the doubleclick.net domains.

For example in IPtables on Linux, you‘d add:

/sbin/iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -d doubleclick.net -j DROP 

This instantly drops all outbound TCP packets intended for doubleclick.net from your server.

If using a hosts file, you can also redirect requests:

0.0.0.0 doubleclick.net

Pros

• Very granular blocking directly on your server.
• Don‘t need Google Analytics access.

Cons

• Requires server root or hosts file access.
• Rules would need replicating to any other servers.

So firewall rules get the job done but require more technical know-how.

Special Considerations for WordPress Sites

If running WordPress, you have even more options to block doubleclick.net at the platform level, such as:

• Using a dedicated plugin like Simple Blocker
• Adding WordPress hook code to your theme‘s functions.php file:

add_filter( ‘script_loader_src‘, ‘block_doubleclick_requests‘ );

function block_doubleclick_requests( $src ) {

    if ( strpos( $src, ‘doubleclick.net‘ ) ) {
        return FALSE;
    }

    return $src;
}

This hook checks enqueued script sources and blocks anything trying to load doubleclick.net.

So in summary, directly through Google Analytics is likely the easiest approach for most site owners. But more advanced methods like firewall rules and WordPress filters work great too for technical teams with server access.

Now let‘s validate requests are actually blocked…

Confirm Doubleclick is Blocked

Verifying doubleclick requests are disabled is simple using free website speed tools:

1. Use WebPageTest or Pingdom Website Speed Test.
2. Enter your target site URL.
3. Click start test.
4. Once test completes, click the Performance Circle or Waterfall tab in the results.
5. Scan down the requests list on the left for any entries containing "doubleclick".

Before disabling doubleclick you should see various entries like:

• ad.doubleclick.net
• stats.g.doubleclick.net

But after disabling via one of the above methods, zero results should contain "doubleclick" if things are properly blocked.

You can even rerun the test if you want to validate changes over time. The main thing is confirming no outbound requests are still happening from your live site.

With doubleclick requests stopped, you‘ve freed up resources for your actual site content instead of useless ads and remarketing trackers. 👏

Additional Tips to Optimize Website Speed

Blocking doubleclick.net requests gives you an instant performance boost. But it‘s just one piece of the website optimization puzzle.

Here are some additional best practices to employ:

• Minify CSS, JS and HTML – Removes unnecessary whitespace and metadata to reduce file sizes browsers need to fetch.
• Implement Caching – Store static assets in a temporary cache so they don‘t need to be re-downloaded with each page visit. This includes caching dynamic data like database query results that don‘t frequently change.
• Lazy Load Images – Only load images visible in the user‘s browser viewport instead of all at once. Significantly cuts down initial load resources.
• Resize Images – Scale down oversized images to the displayed size in your stylesheet. Smaller file sizes equals faster loading.
• Remove Unused Plugins – Audit whether all active plugins are actually needed, as each one adds more resources overhead. Disable or uninstall plugins that aren‘t actively contributing to save resources long term.
• Upgrade Hosting Platform – Slow shared servers greatly hamper performance. Consider a managed WordPress host like WPEngine or Cloudways for faster load times.

Start with the quick win of blocking doubleclick, then work through implementing advanced caching, intelligent assets loading, and optimized platforms to take performance to the next level.

Every step you gradually reduce needless usage and wasted time for repeat visitors to your site. And visitors have very little patience – you want to load captivating content as fast as possible.

Hopefully this gives you ideas for unlocking a faster website step-by-step!

Now over to you – go forth and block annoying doubleclick requests, then measure how much speedier your site loads. I expect you‘ll be surprised just how much low hanging fruit like this can add up. Let me know your before vs after results in the comments!